Will the next-generation eradicate online launch dilemmas?

With the likes of GTA 5, SimCity and Final Fantasy XIV all struggling during the launch of their online offerings, will the next-generation of consoles be able to ensure that failing servers are a thing of the past?

With the likes of GTA 5, SimCity and Final Fantasy XIV all struggling during the launch of their online offerings, will the next-generation of consoles be able to ensure that failing servers are a thing of the past?

How unprepared a launch is, server-wise, is definitely more down to the suits holding the wallets than any kind of analysis. Servers are expensive, especially servers at this level. Overcompensate unecessarily and you waste a lot of money, under compensate and you can always add more. That's just how it works. The fact that we, the consumer, always bear the brunt of such executive decisions doesn't seem to bother them and to a certain degree a level of animosity is expected and accepted.

The cloud solution is interesting, because of these 300,000 servers not all of them are available to a single game, or even 10 games. Every game released on the platform has access to them. Sure GTAV on cloud servers might not have had launch issues, assuming hardware was the only restriction and not dodgy net code or software inefficiencies. But what about people NOT playing these games? Who prioritiese the traffic?

Virgin media has a massively sophisticated bandwidth management system that they drop available bandwidth from tv channels that arent being watched to those that are. For example when a football match or significant TV event is on. The result is that at some point somewhere there will be some content that is suffering for one service hogging all the bandwidth....or said service still suffers because bandwidth is held back from it.

If MS really has enough infrastructure to cope with all this I'll be surprised. Even Google has issues from time to time and they probably have the largest server farm in the world (probably).

How unprepared a launch is, server-wise, is definitely more down to the suits holding the wallets than any kind of analysis. Servers are expensive, especially servers at this level. Overcompensate unecessarily and you waste a lot of money, under compensate and you can always add more. That's just how it works. The fact that we, the consumer, always bear the brunt of such executive decisions doesn't seem to bother them and to a certain degree a level of animosity is expected and accepted.

The cloud solution is interesting, because of these 300,000 servers not all of them are available to a single game, or even 10 games. Every game released on the platform has access to them. Sure GTAV on cloud servers might not have had launch issues, assuming hardware was the only restriction and not dodgy net code or software inefficiencies. But what about people NOT playing these games? Who prioritiese the traffic?

Virgin media has a massively sophisticated bandwidth management system that they drop available bandwidth from tv channels that arent being watched to those that are. For example when a football match or significant TV event is on. The result is that at some point somewhere there will be some content that is suffering for one service hogging all the bandwidth....or said service still suffers because bandwidth is held back from it.

If MS really has enough infrastructure to cope with all this I'll be surprised. Even Google has issues from time to time and they probably have the largest server farm in the world (probably).

I'm assuming that this new platform is running on Azure or something very similar which like Amazon's EC2 and Rackspace Cloud offer elastic scaling - i.e. the busier a particular service gets the more servers get automatically provisioned to help with the load and then are spun down when there is less demand.

Therefore I think Microsoft are plenty capable of pulling this off, it's a platform they know very well.